Let me know if you find typos, factual errors, logical errata, or just things to improve upon. These will then be incorporated into future editions.

Download the Manifesto » (PDF, 191k)
Download A Social Utility Model of Intellectual Property Enforcement » (PDF, 256k)

The new Writings section has also bumped ResEdit Pro off the downloads page. Classic was already long in the tooth when I abandoned it in 2006, and 4 years later, there was no reason to keep it except for historical interest. If you’re still dying to have it for whatever reason, let me know and I can send it.

This is the Wordle of the blog so far. I would have expected to see more economics relative to theology, but maybe economics just has a more varigated vocabulary. Or maybe I write about God a lot more than I realize.

The new Ambassador Camp website has just gone live. From the Portfolio page:

Ambassador Camp is an Christ-centered summer camp in Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina. This site was taken on after the old domain was lost to a hosting company that went under, and moves them from a very basic Frontpage website to something both more visually appealing, informative to the visitor, and powerful for the administrators. The content box, extending into the header, is the actual sign outside the camp’s campus, lending itself visually to associations with the camp’s physical location.

I’ve been close to the camp for a while now, so I was keen on the opportunity to do their website as it moved to its new domain. The old site was more or less a separate and unconnected entity from the camp itself, so the new site pulls a lot of resources previously only in print (the brochure, registration form, contact, etc. – hopefully the camp history and the video in the near future as well) and moves them online, and makes for a much more flexible method of publishing news and updates as they should come along.

1) It’s wider. I’ve been designing for 1024 wide screens for quite a while now – Dragonblade (defunct), Epta Astera, Campus Crossroads, NetUtopia (what ever happened to that anyway? Sheesh) – in fact, this was one of the last 800 wide designs I ever did; almost three years ago. High time to bring it into the future, I figure.

2) The Header is different. I’m not a fan of change for the sake of change – I change because I believe things can be made better. The old header, after a while, came to seem very unbalanced – both horizontally and vertically. This header, while using the same themes as the last, balances itself much more nicely than the last, and comes in a good 44 pixels shorter, saving valuable vertical space (and bandwidth; it’s a pretty wide image). This newfound balance also led to…

3) The navigation has moved! No longer is it in the sidebar, but in the header. I believe it’s much more prominent and accessible there. The sidebar as it was was the only holdover from the last incarnation of the site (anyone remember the gray bevelled border? No? Good) – in almost exactly the same form, though with a black background and different icons. But they were Apple’s icons. No points for originality there. And though they were nice icons in their own right, they didn’t match the theme of the site. I briefly considered a horizontal navigation, but the treeline doesn’t lend itself well to that. Moving them into the header also reclaims a lot of wasted space up there, frees up vertical space in the sidebar, and saves bandwidth by getting rid of that image there.

4) There’s a Twitter there… Yeah yeah, fad, trendy, whatever. For a long time I’ve wanted something like a tumblelog on which to post quick, short thoughts (a Youtube video I enjoyed, a band I just discovered, etc.) – separately from the flow of the rest of the blog, which is more for longer articles. Twitter serves that purpose well enough, and, why the heck not? If it’s trendy, that just means more people to connect with – which is definitely a plus with this sort of thing.

On the backend, 5) It’s completely Wordpress powered. No more static PHP pages patching into the Wordpress loop from the outside. The entire site – pages and all – are all Wordpress now. This brings a few disadvantages with code flexibility, meta keywords (I imagine there are plugins for that), and permalinks (working on getting those fixed – hopefully old blog links should work soon) – but these can for the most part be mitigated, and it brings in a whole host of advantages like pages now being searchable (!) and (so much more) ease of maintenance.

There will be many tweaks and refinements over the next few days and weeks, so if you notice anything strange or broken (like the contact page [UPDATE: Contact page works!] – that will hopefully be up again soon, and work this time), leave a comment and let me know so I can fix it up.

Over the past year I’ve been playing around with musical composition, and I think the result is finally ready to go public. It goes by the name Epta Astera (Seven Stars in Koine Greek), and consists of influences from gregorian, medieval, neofolk, black metal, post-industrial, and a few other musical styles (varying from song to song; it would be pretty difficult to stuff all of that into each one). Check out the website www.eptaastera.com for more information and to download the album.